A stumbling block for Margarete Müller has been set into the ground at Heideloffstrasse 24 in Nuremberg, south of the main train station. You can find out more about her story on the Internet since Friday, as well as about the fate of 128 other people who fell victim to National Socialism. Stolpersteine - a project by the artist Gunter Demnig – have been laid in Nuremberg since 2004, and the “Geschichte für Alle” association has been researching the victims’ biographies for three years.
So now, free of pathos, one can read the story of Margarete, known as Grete, Müller. She was born on September 30, 1898 in Nuremberg, her father was a manager, her mother worked as a tailor. Her family lived at Heideloffstrasse 24, where a stumbling block reminds of her today.
Margarete Müller first graduated from a women’s academic school and worked as an educator. She later trained to be a gymnastics teacher, attended weaving courses and gave lessons. Falling stairs, as “Geschichte für Alle” and students of the Hermann-Kesten-Kolleg in Nuremberg researched, led to complaints that prevented them from exercising their profession. She also suffered mentally from this fact. In 1934 she was admitted to a “sanatorium” where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In December 1940 Margarete Müller was transferred to the Hartheim Castle killing center near Linz and murdered in the gas chamber. The perpetrators called this “euthanasia”, meaning “planned extermination”, says the historian Pascal Metzger.
Stumbling blocks, he says, are reminiscent of people who fell victim to the Nazi state: Jews, homosexuals, the mentally ill and many more. When walking through the city every day, one would be confronted with their names and a message: “The persecution started here, everyone could see it.”